Complete Works of William Hope Hodgson

by Hodgson, William Hope

  “Pull!” Captain Gell had roared. And he and the Carpenter had lain back on the life-line, pulling like madmen. Abruptly something had “given,” and they had hauled up hand over hand, and there had burst up through the water in the companionway, the rubber and helmet covered Cargunka, with an enormous, naked, sodden-looking human body, that was gripped fiercely to Cargunka, and lashed about with its great legs.

  As they hauled Cargunka and the thing clear up into the daylight, the naked body ceased to thrash about and strike, and loosed away from Cargunka, who immediately staggered, splashing and rolling, to his feet. Captain Gell and the Carpenter jumped to him, and set their arms about him, to support him clear of the thing that now beat about feebly, and bleeding, in the knee-deep water that covered the poop-deck. But Cargunka pulled away from the two of them, and turned to the thing in the water.

  “Don’t go near it!” shouted Captain Gell, in a tone of horror. “Don’t go near it!”

  As he spoke, the body rolled up its great bearded face, and Cargunka let out a yell that they could hear despite his helmet.

  “It’s big ole Cap’n Barstow! It’s big ole Cap’n Barstow!” he was shouting. And he backed away from the quietening body, even as the two others backed away, on catching what he was shouting; for it was fixed in all their minds that old Captain Barstow had been dead those three years.

  Then, suddenly, Reason took hold again, and the three men jumped forward to lift the dying, drowning old man out of the water, that he was striving to keep his head above. They began to carry him to the boat, but he died on the way.

  Chapter VI

  They took the old man aboard the Happy Return, to put him beside the dead bo’sun. But here, to their delighted amazement, they found the bo’sun sitting up on the hatch, with his blanket round him, and his face full of bewilderment. They realised that they had been somewhat premature in their diagnoses; and the realisation made them re-examine the old Captain; but the three bullet-wounds made it unmistakably plain that there was no second case of temporarily suspended animation.

  It was as they were attending to the bo’sun, who was still very weak and shaky, that they heard a constant murmur of shouting, from some distant place, away on the other side of the island. The shouting increased in volume, and presently it broke into a sort of deep chorus, which Cargunka recognised to be the chorus of the “Fate of the Laughing Sally.”

  With a quick, extraordinary premonition of what all this portended, he ran across to the shore side of the vessel; and there, sure enough, in a few minutes he saw all his crew come down out of the woods, singing at the top of their voices, and escorting the steward in their center, who had his arm round what might have been taken for a smallish man, dressed in a strange suit, made apparently of old ship’s canvas. It was the hair, however, that told Cargunka it was indeed a woman; and the attitude of the joy-drunken steward made it very plain that the miracle had happened… that it was his “Agnes” — the phonograph contralto singer — that he had found somewhere hid on the island. Cargunka whooped madly, and raced round to where his small punt was made fast alongside. He leaped in, without a word to the others, and rowed ashore.

  The men opened out for him, and stopped their singing. But the steward began to shout, at the top of his voice:— “It’s her! It’s her! I knew I’d find her!”

  Cargunka pulled off his felt hat, and looked at the woman. He saw a pretty, piquant face, with clear, bright blue eyes, and a face extraordinarily sun-browned.

  He held out his hand to her.

  “The Almighty sure does wonderful things, Miss,” he said, simply. “But I guess He never done a wonderfuller than this.”

  The girl was shaking and almost crying with excitement and joy. “Oh, yes, yes…” she began, and forthwith began to cry outright, with sheer happiness and shock.

  The one-time bartender held out a big hand to Cargunka, and the little man gripped it so hard that the big man winced.

  “I thank God I met you, Sir,” said the big man.

  “My Oath!” said the little man, confusedly. “Same here.”

  Chapter VII

  The remainder of this tale is soon told. The girl had been found in a small cave at the far end of the island (which is about seven and a half miles long). She had lived there in hiding all the three years, so as to keep out of the way of big old Captain Barstow, who had gone very definitely mad when he saw the vessel, carrying all of his long-hoarded money, go down.

  Once, when she had ventured down to the vicinity of the wreck, he had chased her for a couple of miles, screaming out mad oaths, and threats of what he would do, if ever he caught her there again. For the poor fellow, in his madness, could think of nothing but his gold, and suspected that she intended to rob him.

  Often, she had watched him, from a distance, diving, diving, all day long. Indeed, she described him as seeming almost to live on the submerged craft; but whether he had ever succeeded in salving any of his gold she could not say.

  In all the time on the island, there had not called another vessel; and she had begun to feel that she might end her life there. She had grown to keep so much to her own little valley at the other end of the island, that she had actually known nothing of the arrival of the Happy Return, until the steward found her that morning out fishing from the rocks; and she admitted that it was possible there might have been another vessel to the island, without her knowing; but she thought it very unlikely, as she had not grown careless in watching until the latter months of her stay.

  As regards the curious striking of the bell, and the attack on the bo’sun and Cargunka, these were obviously nothing more than the tricks of an obsessed mind, conceived and carried out with the characteristic cunning and remorselessness of the true monomaniac. It was plain that the last thing the madman had desired was visitors to the island. Possibly there had been some other ship called in, and he may have adopted similar means to frighten them away.

  As regards the money, a large part of this, amounting to over three thousand pounds, was found in the cave which the old Captain had inhabited. A careful search of the wreck led them to a second “find,” under the cemented-down iron ballast, of which the barque carried a little for stiffening. It had been this, doubtless, that had kept the Captain diving hopelessly all those years; for it was possible to trace where he had made crazy, ineffectual efforts to shift the great, shaped masses of iron, under which, at some earlier period, he had obviously placed a portion of his wealth for safety.

  An examination of the fo’cas’le head, and the deck house aft, showed how the Captain had managed to breathe, whilst apparently remaining under water; for the stairs that led down out of the poop-deck house (or chart-house) led down into the steward’s pantry; and as the top of the house was always above water, the Captain had been able to obtain fresh air for as long as he liked, by simply rising to the surface of the water inside the deserted and closed-up deck house.

  In somewhat the same way, he had probably dived into the fo’cas’le, when he played the hanky-panky with the bell, hitting it probably with a piece of wood; for there was a quantity of imprisoned air (renewed each ebb) just under the perfectly air-tight deck of the fo’cas’le head.

  Chapter VIII

  Five days later, the Happy Return continued her voyage to ‘Frisco, and Cargunka returned happily to his daily pleasures in the galley. This apparently puzzled the girl, Agnes Jensag, who knew him to be the “Owner”; but when she poked her head inside the galley doorway to ask whether she could not be of some use, Cargunka shook his head, and offered her a seat on the locker. He was peeling potatoes, and his pocket volume of Byron’s Poems was propped up on the dresser before him.

  “Wonderful man, Miss,” said Cargunka, pointing at the book with his knife. He wiped his hand on his apron, and handed the book across to her, opened at the frontispiece, which was an engraving of Byron himself.

  “It’s said by them as knows, to be remarkable like me, Miss,” said Cargunka.
r />   The girl flashed a quick glance at him, and understood.

  “Yes,” she said, gravely, “I can quite see what you mean;” which was strictly the truth, and, at the same time, pleased the little man tremendously.

  “An’ there’s my legs, Miss, just the same wiv me as it was wiv ‘im. An’ the same leg, too,” he told her, earnestly. “An’ he was a fair devil wiv the wimmin, too….”

  Cargunka realised that his tongue had run ahead a bit, and he changed the talk, by asking her whether she would mind singing him the ballad of “The Fate of the Laughing Sally.” The girl smiled and did as he wished, singing in a low, sweet contralto, that made the little man lean back in ecstasy, with closed eyes, and set him beating a slow time with the potato knife. She sang right through to the last line: —

  “And the bells grow faint and lost.”

  And Cargunka opened his eyes and stared silently away through the open door to leeward.

  “And the bells of the Laughing Sally ring

  And die away forever.”

  he quoted, scarcely above his breath. “I reck’n it’s gone eight bells wiv ‘er for the last time. Aye!” He nodded vaguely astern. “Like as it’ll be me an’ one of the brigs one of these days. It’s bound to come to all of us…. At sea or in bed; As I have said…. You might put that rhyme down for me, Miss. My ‘ands is wet. There’s pencil an’ my poetry-writin’ book back of you on the shelf. I writes ’em down as they comes to me,” he said simply.

  WE TWO AND BULLY DUNKAN

  I

  “Don’t go, Miles,” I said. “Better lose your pay-day. It seems he’s got it in for you, and a common sailorman can do nothing against the after-guard.”

  “I’m going back, John,” he told me. “I swore he’d not haze me out of the ship, and he shan’t. He’s belted the rest of the crew half silly, and they’ve bunked, without drawing a penny. Some of the poor devils even left their sea-chests. I expect he thinks I’m going to do the same; but he’s mightily mistaken.”

  This was in ‘Frisco. I had just run up against Miles, who had a badly swollen face, and an ugly scar over his right eyebrow.

  “What is it?” I’d asked him. “Been a trip with a Yankee Skipper?”

  “Just that, John,” he answered me. “Bully Dunkan!”

  “Goo’ Lor’!” I said. “Were you drunk when you signed on?”

  For no free, sober white-man ever sails with Bully Dunkan, not unless it’s that or the hard and stony beach. That is just what it had been with poor old Miles; and he’d had a Number One rough time of it; for once, when he explained that he misliked the application of the Mate’s heavy sea-boot to his rear anatomy, the Mate had promptly knocked him down, having first slipped a big brass knuckle-duster on his fist, to emphasise his accompanying and entirely unprintable remarks. This accounted for the scar over my old shipmate’s eye.

  The swollen face had been acquired at a later date; to be exact, about a week before the ship reached ‘Frisco. It was what I might describe as the lingering physical memory of an efficiently dislocated jaw. The dislocation had been the personal and vigourous handiwork of Bully Dunkan himself. It appears that Miles, one afternoon, so far forgot his early training as to withhold the other cheek, during one of the Mate’s attentive moods. In fact, I understand that Miles actually hit the man (Hogge by name and nature) so hearty a wallop with his fist, that he floored him on the main-deck. The next thing that poor Miles knew was, as he put it, stars. Old Bully Dunkan had come up behind him, wearing felt slippers, and hit him solidly with his fist, on the side of the jaw.

  Bully Dunkan weighed two hundred pounds, in his stockings, and his title isn’t a fancy one. So when Miles came round, in about ten minutes, and found the Bo’sun and Chips, the carpenter, trying to heave his jaw back into place, he wasn’t surprised; but, as he told me, it hurt a lot; which I could believe, by the look of the swelling!

  “Well,” I told him, “you’re a fool, if you try to make the trip back to Boston in her. He’ll have it in pretty savage for you.”

  Miles, however, is a pig-headed brute, when he’s fixed on anything; so when he just shook his head, I told him I would sacrifice my bones on the altar of friendship, and sign on for the return trip with him, just to look after him a bit!

  “John,” he said, in his solemn, earnest kind of way, “you’re a friend to tie to. And I’ll not try to persuade you not to come — not until you’ve heard the rest of what I’ve got to tell you: —

  “When we were coming up from Sydney, through the Islands, the Old Man and the Mate went ashore one night in the boat. I was one of the boat’s crew, and a chap, called Sandy Meg, was the other.

  “We were told to stay by the boat, and lie just off the shore a bit. I thought it was a rummy business; and ugly too; for both the Skipper and the Mate had guns. They were loading them in the boat, while we were pulling ashore.

  “Well, they’d been ashore about an hour, I should think, when Sandy Meg nudged me to listen. I heard what he meant, then; for there was a faint, far-off screaming, seeming about a mile or more away; and then there were several shots. I could swear to that.

  “ ‘What do you make of it, Sandy?’ I asked him; but he shook his head, and wouldn’t answer. Poor devil; they had fairly beaten the bit of spirit out of him. Not that he was ever very wise.

  “About half an hour later, I heard someone running, up among the trees; and then I saw the Mate and the Captain coming down to the bench at a run, and singing out to us to bring the boat ashore, smart.

  “They fairly raced down the sands, and I could see they were carrying a packet between them; pretty heavy it seemed, and done up in some of that native matting. They hove this down into the bottom of the boat; and I swear it sounded like coin, packed tight. Then they shoved her out and scrambled in, yelling to us to give way, which we did, with the two of them double-banking the oars, and driving her out stern-first.

  “We’d got out about three hundred yards, when a man came out of the woods, and ran down the shore, a white man, by the look of him in the moonlight; but, of course, that’s half guessing. He knelt down near the edge of the water, and then there was a flash, and something knocked splinters off the port gunnel of the boat, and there was the bang of one of these old Martinis. I recognised the sound!

  “By the time he’d loaded and fired twice more, we were too far away to get hurt. He never touched the boat, after that first shot. I saw several other men on the shore; but I suppose they can’t have had anything to shoot with.

  “Then we were heading away for the ship — she looked like a ghost out on the sea; too far away for the people ashore to recognise anything about her.

  “Next day, when I was sent up to lace on the boat-cover, I saw something in the bottom, that made me stare. When I’d reached for it, I found it was a twenty-dollar gold piece. You’ll remember the package they dumped into the bottom of the boat! Now what do you make of all that?”

  “Ugly!” I said.

  “Well,” he told me, “that’s one more reason why I’m going home to Boston in her. I’ve to get square for these” (he touched the scar and his jaw) “and I reckon the best way to get square with hogs of that kind, is to touch them right on their dollar-marks. Now, are you strong to come, as ever?”

  “Stronger,” I told him. “Only I guess we’ll go heeled. There’s sure to be some excitement coming to us this trip. Tell me, where is the lazarette trap — in the pantry, or in the big cabin?”

  “Neither,” said Miles. “Bully Dunkan sits on the grub hatch, as they say! The hatch of the lazarette is in his own cabin, and opens up under his table. It’s no good thinking of that, John. And there’s no getting in through the lazarette bulkshead, from the hold. She’s stowed up with cargo, solid to the deck-beams. I’ve thought of all that. I’ve thought of things for hours at a time; but I can’t see how to do it!”

  “He drinks pretty heavily, doesn’t he?” I asked.

  “No,” said Miles, “not for him, you k
now. I’ve never seen him stupid with it yet. And he sleeps so light, that we always have to go to the wheel on the port side of the poop. His cabin is on the starboard side, and he comes up raging, if anyone walks over his head.”

  “Do you happen to know what kind of irons they carry?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he told me. “They ironed Billy Duckworth. He went for the two of them, with an iron belaying-pin, after they had both been kicking him. They laid him out stiff; and ironed him down in the lazarette. Kept him there three days on water. He told me they’ve got big iron rings, let into the deck of the lazarette, and a chain and padlock. The way they fixed him up, was by handcuffing his two hands together, and then passing the chain over the handcuffs and through one of the rings in the deck, and padlocking him there, like a wild beast.”

  “Um!” I said; “and of course the lazarette’s kept locked?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t see it matters anyway. It’s not the lazarette that’s going to be any use to us.”

  “Perhaps not,” I said. “It certainly sounds a tough proposition. Let’s go and have a drink.”

  II

  Bully Dunkan signed me on, in a joyous mood, for him! But I had to ape to be half drunk, or he’d have smelled several kinds of a rat; for free, American white-men don’t offer to go promiscuously to sea with him; unless they’re either not sober, or they’re on the rocks; and I wasn’t ragged enough for that yarn to tally-up with appearances.